Grasshopper Mayhem

We haven’t had a proper grasshopper surge like this for years.  Not exactly Darkness at Noon with plague locusts blotting out the sky, but really too many for my taste.

The most visible ones were initially the wingless grasshoppers (Phaulacridium vittatum) which as the name says have relatively short horns and don’t fly, just jump.   Every step you take across the grass leads to the “tick, tick, tick” of insects leaping out of your way.  Opening a door always lets two or three inside.

They’ve been eating the trees planted on Esdale in 2025. Unforgivable. They’ve also been eating my apricots, corn, peaches and apples.  Although we carefully netted the fruit trees against birds, the weave is large enough that grasshoppers can get through and chew patches. We had to pick the apricots early just to ensure we got some from our new tree.

 With the corn, they’ve added to the destruction wreaked by ants, who devour the cornsilk which allows pollination of the cob, by chewing on the cob from the top down.  Luckily the ants were a bit slower this year, so most of the cobs pollinated.   I noticed the cob chewing and rescued our little crop in time to have a corn feast. 

A few are the “slant-faced” type (genus acrida) which seem to be in much lower numbers.    They’re supposedly a potential agricultural pest, but they don’t seem to be in ridiculous numbers,

In the last couple of weeks we’ve also been getting the yellow-winged flying locusts (Gastrimargus musicus) which has a louder clicking sound on takeoff.  I saw them a few weeks ago on the other side of the river, but now they’re here in the Esdale garden as well. 

I suspect that the bare soil we had at intervals during 2025 gave the grasshoppers opportunities to lay their eggs. 

The predators of grasshoppers seem rather slow to arrive – or ineffective.  Our neighbour Andrew saw a strange wasp nest in a pile of dirt which turned out to be a “prionyx” – a grasshopper eating wasp.  Since grasshoppers hatch from bare soil, it seems a logical place for a predator. 

I saw a small flock of ibis working their way through a paddock along Kaveney’s Road.  I guess they’re taking a break from the municipal transfer station (dump) in Murrumbateman.  I remember a huge flock of them in the 1970s coming to rescue us from a similar grasshopper outbreak. 

And  the other night I startled slightly at the huge huntsman spider (“Delena cancerides” I think) sitting on the glass door of our bedroom with something in its mouth.  It was chewing its way through a slant-faced grasshopper.  Good luck to it.